Word: outcastes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...stories, is in most ways a letdown. Leafstorm, the long work, is also about Macondo, but it is an early, earnest exercise in which three narrators-a boy, his mother and his grandfather-recall the old man's efforts to give a decent burial to an outcast whom the town wants to leave to the vultures...
...personified him in Animal Farm as the loquacious pig Snowball, driven out by the dictator pig Napoleon and afterward blamed for everything that goes wrong on the farm. For decades, many liberal intellectuals have overheated their imaginations and their prose on an image of Trotsky as the unbending political outcast and talented literary man. To his closest followers, he was a saint who suffered his final martyrdom in Mexico on Aug. 20, 1940, when a Stalinist assassin buried an Alpine ax in the old Bolshevik's head...
...Screens, however, lacks the caste v. outcast tensions of The Blacks and the musky eroticism of The Balcony. In a Genetic mutation of Bertolt Brecht, the playwright doubly fails. He tries to apply the epical veneer of The Caucasian Chalk Circle to the theme of little people whipped about in a historical convulsion, in this case France's punitive struggle with Algeria. Brecht succeeded because he had a certain sympathy for the last-ditch valor of his little people even when he portrayed them as cagey sneaks. Genet fails because he regards all people as maggots...
...life have none with the consumptive laundresses, wistful acrobats and delicately shaded cripples who populate Picasso's canvases between 1902 and 1906. On one level, they record his experience of the miserable and dehumanizing poverty that lay around him in Paris and Barcelona; on another, the beggar-as-outcast is equated with the artist-as-outsider...
...made the world and set out the sun and moon as lights to land dwellers, that brothers had fought, that one of the races was saved, the other cursed. Yet . . . it came to me with a fierce jolt that I wanted it, yes! Even if I must be the outcast, cursed by the rules of his hideous fable." Grendel soon casts off this grim, comforting illusion. Thereafter John Gardner's own fable, by turns grisly, comic and curiously touching, follows Grendel's twelve-yearlong crusade against the Danes-to force them into seeing "the mindless, mechanical brutishness...